A DIF­FER­ENT TAKE ON THE IN­DUS­TRY

Radiohead are not the only mu­si­cal heavy­weights do­ing things their own way.

Only last week the Crazy in Love star de­lighted fans world­wide with the re­lease of sixth al­bum Lemon­ade, com­pletely out of the blue. The 34-year-old used an hour-long HBO spe­cial and In­sta­gram to re­veal how the ‘vis­ual al­bum’ was go­ing to be avail­able ex­clu­sively on Tidal, the mu­sic stream­ing ser­vice that just hap­pens to be owned by hip hop ty­coon, and her hus­band, Jay Z. It’s not the first time Bey has sur­prised fans or the mu­sic in­dus­try. Back in 2013 she re­leased Bey­once, also a vis­ual al­bum which fea­tured col­lab­o­ra­tions with Jay-Z, Frank Ocean, Drake and more.

The Cana­dian rap­per rush re­leased his 2015 al­bum If You’re Read­ing This It’s Too Late in Fe­bru­ary and the col­lec­tion set the record for most streams from an al­bum on the ser­vice Spo­tify. In just three days, songs from the al­bum had been streamed a stag­ger­ing 17 mil­lion times. The Hot­line Bling star then pro­moted fourth stu­dio al­bum Views with a se­ries of pop-up events across the United States. It was also aired on Ap­ple Mu­sic’s OVO Sound ra­dio sta­tion days ago be­fore be­ing ex­clu­sively re­leased on iTunes on the same night (April 28).

The world had waited long enough for new re­lease Anti af­ter many false starts, de­lays and ru­mours of ditched ma­te­rial. Af­ter all, the Di­a­monds singer had first hinted about a new al­bum be­ing out soon as far back as Novem­ber 2014. The re­lease of the al­bum in Jan­uary this year was still seen as a sur­prise given the lack of fan­fare or build up for such a big star. What wasn’t ex­pected though was the way the ma­te­rial got out to the gen­eral pub­lic. A ‘sys­tem er­ror’ saw the 13-track al­bum re­leased by Tidal on Jan­uary 27, a day ear­lier than ex­pected, and sub­se­quently leaked to mu­sic fans all over the in­ter­net.